Nevada, Missouri: The Bushwhacker Capital

Vernon County, Missouri was a hotbed of guerrilla warfare, and its county seat wears that history on its sleeve. Nevada calls itself the Bushwhacker Capital of the World. Bushwhackers were Missouri's Confederate guerrillas, operating along the brutal Kansas-Missouri border where the Civil War was less a clash of armies than a cycle of ambush, reprisal, and arson.

In May of eighteen sixty-three, Union soldiers burned Nevada, including the courthouse, in retaliation for guerrilla raids. General Thomas Ewing's infamous Order Number Eleven then forced the evacuation of entire rural counties along the border. Nevada was rebuilt after the war and serves as the county seat today.

The Bushwhacker Museum tells this story with artifacts, documents, and some genuine moral complexity about what the border war cost everyone it touched.